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For Major League Baseball starting pitcher Jameson Taillon, that means spring training with the Pittsburgh Pirates, in Bradenton, Fla.

“It’s about that time of year, Spring Training in 4 days!” Taillon wrote on Twitter earlier this month. “Excited about the work we put in this offseason, and ready to put it all together and get after it on the mound all year.”

Monday served as the check-in day for pitchers and catchers. Wednesday was the first day for workouts, at Pirate City.

Taillon, as pointed out by Blue Jays announcer Buck Martinez last summer when the Pirates visited Rogers Centre in Toronto, has family in the Cornwall area.

His dad Mike was born in Cornwall, and grew up in St. Andrews West.

Jameson Taillon, who grew up in Florida and Texas, has dual citizenship. The 26-year-old has faced a lot of challenges early in his pro career, including having Tommy John surgery to repair a ligament in his elbow in 2014, and being diagnosed with testicular cancer last spring.

Taillon finished the 2017 season with an 8-7 record and 4.44 earned-run-average.

The Pirates took him second overall in the 2010 draft, between Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, and Taillon would go on to receive a $6.5-million signing bonus, the second-largest in draft history.

The first spring training or “Grapefruit League” game for the Pirates is next Friday (Feb. 23).

It’s Pittsburgh’s 50th spring training in Bradenton, which is just south of Tampa.

At the very end of Grapefruit League play last spring, Taillon pitched a game at Olympic Stadium in Montreal when the Pirates played against Toronto, the crowd of over 43,000 including about 20 of his relatives in the stands.

At the time, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writer Stephen Nesbitt wrote Taillon’s Canadian heritage is a bit of a secret, with most fans seemingly unaware of it and staying silent during his pre-game introduction.

Williamstown’s Eric Ming and the Queen’s Gaels men’s varsity hockey team enter the OUA playoffs as the ninth-ranked team in Canada, and they have a first-round date with the seventh-ranked Nipissing Lakers from North Bay.

The series was to get underway on Wednesday night in North Bay, with game two back in Kingston on Friday night at the Memorial Centre.

The Gaels won all three meetings against the Lakers in 2017-18, in what was a record-breaking season for the team, an all-time high of 19 wins for the regular campaign.

Ming, the former Ontario Hockey League forward with the Kitchener Rangers and later the Niagara IceDogs, finished tied for second in scoring for Queen’s this year, with five goals and 19 assists for 24 points.

The 24-year-old is in his fourth season with the club, studying in the Civil Engineering program.

On the court in Kingston the Queen’s Gaels women’s basketball team in its final regular season home game Saturday had a 21-point comeback, but fell just short in overtime against Ryerson, 82-75.

Cornwall’s Myriam Fontaine had six points in the contest, going 3-for-5 from the field in 16 minutes of action.

The Gaels, ranked eighth in Canada coming into the contest, fell to 16-5 for the campaign. Next up is a 6 p.m. game on Friday night in Ottawa against the Gee-Gees.

Back on the ice, where an untimely slide has occurred late in the season for the Clarkson Golden Knights men’s team, which earlier this campaign had a 14-game win streak spanning several months.

The Golden Knights now have just one win in their last eight outings – to go along with four ties.

At Cheel Arena last weekend, Marly Quince and the Golden Knights battled Cornell to a rare 0-0 overtime draw on Friday night. On Saturday night, the host Golden Knights and Colgate played to a 4-4 OT tie.

In Saturday’s game, played in front of 2,825, Williamstown’s Ross Craig drew an assist on the Colgate goal that tied the contest 4-4, with 4:48 left in regulation time.

Craig, a 21-year-old defenceman, recently returned to the Colgate lineup, and he has two assists in three games. The former Jr. A Colts player had been sidelined for a year, battling back from a concussion injury that ended his freshman season after eight games in 2016-17.

Clarkson, with an overall record of 19-6-5, skates this weekend at Dartmouth College and Harvard University.